Synopsis

A unique love story, a tale of loss, a parable of Europe, this haunting novel is an examination of intimacy and betrayal in a community rarely captured so vibrantly in contemporary literature.

Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as desire. As 1930s fascism spreads over Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. Sharpened by the world of books, which is often frowned upon in the Romani tradition, Zoli becomes the poster girl for a brave new world. As she shapes the ancient songs to her times, she finds her gift embraced by the Gypsy people and savored by a young English expatriate, Stephen Swann.

But Zoli soon finds that when she falls she cannot fall halfway–neither in love nor in politics. While Zoli’s fame and poetic skills deepen, the ruling Communists begin to use her for their own favor. Cast out from her family, Zoli abandons her past to journey to the West, in a novel that spans the 20th century and travels the breadth of Europe.

Colum McCann, acclaimed author of Dancer and This Side of Brightness, has created a sensuous novel about exile, belonging and survival, based loosely on the true story of the Romani poet Papsuza. It spans the twentieth century and travels the breadth of Europe. In the tradition of Steinbeck, Coetzee, and Ondaatje, McCann finds the art inherent in social and political history, while vividly depicting how far one gifted woman must journey to find where she belongs.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt

He drives alongside the small streambed, and the terrible shitscape looms up by increments—upturned buckets by the bend in the river, a broken baby carriage in the weeds, a petrol drum leaking out a dried tongue of rust, the carcass of a fridge in the brambles.

A dog, all bones and scars, noses out in front of the car, and within moments the dog has brought children, crowding up against the car windows. He tries nonchalance as he snaps down the locks with his elbow. One boy is agile enough to jump onto the hood with hardly a noise—he grabs the windshield wipers and spreads himself out. A cheer goes up as two other kids take hold of the bumper and skate behind on the bare soles of their feet. Teenage girls jog alongside in their low-slung jeans. One of them points and laughs, but then stops, still, silent. The boy slides off the hood and the skating kids let go of the bumper, and suddenly the river is in front of him, swirling, fast, brown, unexpected. He yanks the steering wheel hard. Brambles scrape the windows. Tall grass crunches under the wheels. The car swerves back towards the mudtrack, and the children run alongside again in uproar.

On the far bank two old women stand up from where they’re washing bedsheets using riverrock and lye. They shake their heads, half-smile, and stoop once more to their work.

He steers around another tight corner, towards a blind line of trees, past the remains of a shattered lettuce crate in the long grass, and there, across a rickety little joke of a bridge, is the gray Gypsy settlement, marooned on an island in the middle of the river, as if the water itself has changed its mind and flowed either side. Shanty houses. Windowless huts. Jagged pipes and mismatched wood. Thin scarves of smoke rising up from the chimneys. Each roof pockmarked with a satellite dish and patched with scraps of corrugated iron. Far off in the distance a single blue coat flaps in the branches of a tree.

He guides the car into the long weeds, stops, pulls the handbrake, takes a second to pretend that he’s looking for something in the glovebox, searches deep, though there’s nothing there, not a thing, just a chance to get a small respite. The children crowd the windows. He pushes open the car door, and all he can hear from the settlement across the water is a dozen radios blaring all at once, songs Slovakian and American and Czech.

Instantly the children thumb his sleeve, knuckle his ribcage, pat his jacket pockets. It’s as if he has become a dozen hands all at once. “Quit!” he shouts, swatting them away. One boy hops on the front bumper so that the whole car bows to the rhythm. “Okay,” he shouts, “enough!” The older teenagers in dark leather jackets shrug. The girls in unbuttoned blouses step back and giggle. How immaculate their teeth. How quick the silver of their pupils. The tallest of the boys steps forward in a muscle-shirt. “Robo,” the boy says, puffing out his chest. They shake hands and he pulls the boy aside, has a word, face close to his ear. He tries to block the deep smell of the boy, wet wool and raw smoke, and within seconds a deal is struck—fifty krowns—to bring him to the elders and to keep the car safe.

Robo shouts out a warning to the others, backhands the child who is tiptoe on the rear bumper. They make their way towards the bridge. More children arrive from along the river, some naked, some in diapers, one in a torn pink dress and flip-flops, and the same girl seems to appear from all angles, but in different shoes each time; beautiful, coal-eyed, hair uncombed.

He watches the kids cross the bridge like a strange line of herons, one foot heavy on the solid planks, high-toed and light on the rest. The metal sheets vibrate under their weight. He totters a moment on a piece of plyboard, sways, reaches for a hold, but there is none. The children put their hands to their mouths and snigger—he is, he thinks, every idiot who has ever walked this way. He feels the weight of what he carries: two bottles, notepad, pencil, cigarettes, camera, and tiny recorder, all hidden away deep in his clothes. He pulls the jacket tight and leaps the final hole in the bridge, lands in the soft mud on the far side, just twenty yards from the shanties. He looks up, takes a deep breath, but it’s as if a thousand chords have been struck all at once, his ribcage is thumping, he shouldn’t have come here alone, a Slovakian journalist, forty-four years old, comfortably fat, a husband, a father, about to step into the heart of a Gypsy camp. He takes a step forward through a puddle, thinking how stupid it was to wear soft leather shoes for this trip, not even good for a quick retreat.

At the edge of the shacks he becomes aware of the brooding men leaning against woodpole doorways. Women stand with hands folded across their stomachs. He tries to catch their gaze, but they look beyond him and away with thousand-yard stares. Strange, he thinks, that they do not question him; maybe they’ve mistaken him for a policeman or a social worker or a parole officer or some other government fuckwad here on an official visit.

He feels briefly powerful as Robo leads him deeper into the warren of mudroutes.

Doorframes used as tables. Sackcloth for curtains. Empty ?cu?cu bottles strung up as windchimes. At his feet, bits of wood and porridge containers, lollipop sticks and shattered glass, the ground-down bones of some dead animal. He catches glimpses of babies hammocked from ceilings, flies buzzing around them as they sleep. He reaches for his camera but is pushed on in the swell of children. Open doorways are quickly closed. Bare bulbs switched off. He notices carpets on the walls, and pictures of Christ, and pictures of Lenin, and pictures of Mary Magdalene, and pictures of Saint Jude lit by small red candles high above empty shelves. From everywhere comes the swell of music, no accordions, no harps, no violins, but every shack with a TV or a radio on full volume, an endless thump.

Robo leans over and shouts in his ear, “Over here, Uncle, follow me,” and it strikes him how foreign this boy, how distant, how dark-skinned.

He is led around a sharp corner to the largest shanty of all. A satellite dish sits new and shiny on the roof. He knocks on the plywood door. It swings open a little further with each knuckle rap. Inside there is a contingent of eight, nine, maybe ten men. They raise their heads like a parliament of ravens. A few of them nod, but they continue their hand, and he knows the game is nonchalance—he has played it himself in other parts of the country, the flats of Bratislava, the ghettos of Pre?sov, the slums of Letanovce.

In the far corner of the room he notices two women watching him, wide-eyed. A hand pushes him at the small of his back. “I’ll wait for you here, mister,” says Robo, and the door creaks behind him.

He looks around the room, the immaculate floor, the ordered cupboards, the whiteness of the one shirt hanging on a nail from the ceiling.

“Nice house,” he says, and knows immediately how foolish it sounds. He flushes red-cheeked, then draws himself tall. In the corner sits a broad-shouldered man, tough, hard-jawed, gray hair tousled after a bad night’s sleep. He steps across and announces quite softly that he’s a journalist, he’s here on a story, he’d like to talk to some of the old folk.

“We’re the old folk,” says the man.

“Right,” he says, and pats his jacket. He fumbles in his pocket and breaks open a pack of Marlboros. Stupid, he knows, not to have broken the seal already. In the silence the others watch him. His hands shake. A bead of sweat runs down his brow. He can almost hear the chest hair rustle under his shirt. He unwinds the plastic, lifts the cellophane, and shoves three cigarettes up like peeping toms.

“Just want to talk,” he says.

The man waits for a light, blows the smoke sideways.

“About what?”

“The old days.”

“Yesterday was long,” says the man with a laugh, and the laughter ripples around the room, tentatively at first, until the women catch it and it builds, unraveling the tension. He is suddenly slapped on the shoulder and his grin breaks wide, and the men start to talk in an accent that starts low and ends high, musical, fast, jangly. Some of the words appear to be in Romani, and from what he can make out, the man’s name is Boshor. He reaches past Boshor, throws the cigarettes on the table, and the men casually reach for them. The women step across, one of them suddenly young and beautiful. She bends for a light, and he looks away from the low swing of her breasts. Boshor points to the cards and says: “We’re playing for a little food, a little drink too.” The man pulls again on the cigarette. “We’re not really drinkers, though.”

He takes his cue from Boshor, opens a button, slips back his shirtfront, exposing his flabby chest, and removes the first bottle like a trophy. Boshor picks up the bottle, turns it in his hands, nods approval, and rattles off a salvo of Romani to more laughter.

He watches as the young girl reaches into a cupboard. She takes down a mahogany box with a silver clasp, opens it wide. A matching set of china cups. She puts them on the table, unscrews the bottle. He is given, he notices, the only china cup that is not chipped.

Boshor leans back and gently says: “Health.”

They clink cups, and Boshor leans forward to whisper: “Oh, it’s for money too, friend. We’re playing cards for money.”

He doesn’t even flinch; he slaps down two hundred krowns. Boshor takes it, slips it into his trousers, smiles, blows smoke towards the ceiling.

“Thank you, friend.”

The cards are put aside, and the drinking starts in earnest. He is amazed how close Boshor sits to him, their knees touching, the dark of the hand on his jacketsleeve, and he wonders now how he will navigate their secrets—even their Slovak is a little difficult to understand, their country dialect—but soon enough the second bottle is on the table. He does it calmly and quickly, as if to suggest it’s always been there. The drinking unfolds, and they begin to talk to him about crooked mayors and bent bureaucrats and subsidies and the dole, and how Kolya was beaten with a pickaxe last week and how they are not allowed into the pubs—“We’re not even allowed within fifty fucking meters”—all the things they know a journalist wants to hear. Even the Gypsies have soundbites, he thinks, as if he should be surprised, all the words down pat—racism, integration, schooling, Roma rights, discrimination—and it’s all horseshit really, though he’s getting somewhere; they become more talkative as the bottles drain, the voices rise to a clamor, and they fall into a story about a motorbike taken by the cops.

“Everything that gets stolen is what we steal,” says Boshor as he leans forward, his eyes slightly bloodshot and tinged with yellow. “It’s always us, isn’t it? We’re prouder than that, you know.”

He nods at Boshor, shifts in his chair, seeks a pocket of silence, passes around more cigarettes, and flicks the matchstick to extinguish the flame.

“So,” he says, “are motorbikes the new Roma horses?”

He’s briefly proud of his question until Boshor repeats it, not once, but twice, and then there’s a giggle from the youngest girl and the men slap their thighs in laughter.

“Shit, friend,” says Boshor. “We don’t even have bridles anymore.”

Another round of laughter goes up, but he pushes his question harder, saying surely horses are part of the ancient Gypsy ways. “Y’know,” he says, “pride, tradition, heritage, that sort of thing?”

Boshor’s chair scrapes against the floor and he leans forward. “I told you, friend, we don’t have any horses.”

“Different times?”

“It was better under the Communists,” says Boshor, flicking ash towards the doorway. “Those were the days.”

And that’s where his heart surges, he’s momentarily high on the lift of it, and just by leaning forward, ever so slightly, he has Boshor by the neck-scruff, a newsman’s trick.

“Yeah, back with the Communists we had jobs, we had houses, we had food,” says Boshor. “They didn’t knock us ’round, no, friend, may my black heart stop beating if I tell a lie.”

“Is that so?”

Boshor nods, and from a battered wallet takes out a photograph of a traveling kumpanija long ago in which the men are elegant and the women long-skirted. They are out on a country road, and a red flag with a hammer and sickle flutters from the caravan roof.

“That’s my Uncle Jozef.”

He takes the photo from Boshor, turns it in his fingers, and wishes to Christ in the clouds above that he had clicked his tape recorder on, for now it has begun, but he wonders how he will reach into his pocket without attracting too much attention, if the small red light will shine through his jacket, and where he should begin his real questions. He wants to say that he is here about Zoli, do you know about Zoli, she was born near here, a Gypsy, a poet, a singer, a Communist too, a Party member, she traveled with harpists once, she was expelled, have you heard her name, did you hear her music, We sing to sweeten the dead grass, did you see her, is she still talked of, From what is broken, what is cracked, I make what is required, was she damned, was she forgiven, did she leave any sign, I will not, no, never call the crooked finger straight, did your fathers tell stories, did your mothers sing her songs, was she ever allowed back?

But when he mentions her name—leaning forward to say, “Have you ever heard of Zoli Novotna?”—the air stalls, the drinking stops, the cigarettes are held at mouth-level, and a silence descends.

Boshor looks towards the doorway and says: “No, I don’t know that name—do you understand me, fat-neck?—and even if I did, that’s not something we would talk about.”

About Colum McCann

Colum McCannis the internationally bestselling author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty languages. He has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. He has been named one of Esquire’s “Best and Brightest,” and his short film Everything in This Country Mustwas nominated for an Oscar in 2005. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program. He lives in New York City with his wife and their three children.

Author Q&A

A Conversation with Colum McCann and Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt: I was saddled with the quintessential miserable Irish childhood. You enjoyed the opposite, didn’t you? What sort of life does a writer need these days in order to carve out a career in novels?

Colum McCann: That’s where I envy you, Frank! You had something to write about from the beginning! I had to carve stories out of nothing! Seriously, though, you’re right. There’s advantages and disadvantages to both. I grew up in a safe, suburban Dublin household. My father didn’t drink. My mother stayed at home. I remember when I came home from school at lunchtime, she would be waiting for me. She used to cut the crusts off my lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. It was a tiny gesture, but representative. I was blessed in so many ways. They looked after us well. We ate together at the family table. We went for walks on Sunday afternoons. And we were surrounded by books. When I think about it, there were thousand of stories in our house. Of course it wasn’t all simple and hunky-dory. It never can be. But it was close and it will always be home. It’s interesting to contemplate the notion that writers are not necessarily born, but that they make themselves–from the stuff of desire, of community, of the need to listen. There ’s never just one way to tell a story. That would be acutely boring. But for me I have no desire to write about my upbringing. Two hundred blank pages. What is it they say? Happiness writes white.

FM: You make these wild imaginative leaps. For This Side of Brightness it was a homeless man living in the subway tunnels. For Dancer it was a gay, Muslim-born ballet icon. Anyone can tell from a quick glance that you’re not homeless and, let’s face it, neither of us really look like dancers, so where do these sto­ries come from?

CM: My stories come from images and then I end up building worlds around them. The story of Rudolph Nureyev stemmed from a story I heard that took place in the ﬂats of Ballymun, where a young boy caught a glimpse of Nureyev on his fam­ily’s ﬁrst television, out on the balcony of a high-rise project. He was holding the TV, and I was awestruck by the notion that a seven-year-old Dublin boy was carrying the world’s great­est dancer in his arms. I wanted to explore the idea that we all have stories, that stories are the ultimate human democracy. It doesn’t matter how white you are, how poor you are, how straight you are, how far-ﬂung you are, we all have stories and the deep need to tell them. That’s the door I’ve been knocking on for quite a while now. That’s my current obsession–the thought that stories are the only true human currency.

FM: Zoli is in some ways your most “foreign” character, a woman, a poet, a Rom, an exile, an Eastern European. How did you discover and maintain her voice?

CM: Zoli broke my heart a number of times. It certainly was the biggest leap I had ever made. But I’m interested in compas­sion and clarity and making new worlds available. Or at least, making old worlds visible–I mean visible in literary terms. To do that I had to try to be honest to her voice. There were oc­casions when I would have to sit for a long time–weeks on end–waiting for her voice to come. She was elusive. Strangely enough, though, now that I’ve ﬁnished the book I can call back her voice in an instant. I can close my eyes and she ’s right there. Many people have written to me to say that they can still hear her echo in their heads.

FM: Growing up around Limerick, we always had our tinkers, our travelers, our Gypsies. I know they’re ethnically different to the Roma, but they seem to share some similarities.

CM: Yes, we had our travelers in Dublin too. They always seemed to embrace mystery. And we had so many clichŽs in place. You know, when we were growing up, my mother used to say to us: “You be good now or the Gypsies’ll come take you away.” Years later I was in a settlement in Slovakia where I heard a mother berating her son. I turned to my translator and asked what was going on. He said: “Oh, she’s giving her son a hard time. She’s telling him that if he doesn’t behave the White Man will come take him away.” I thought I had suddenly come some full strange and lovely circle. We doubt one another. We distrust. We have the same stories. The travelers are Ireland’s oldest minority group. There ’s been a long history of anti-traveler prejudice. There ’s about 30,000 travelers in Ireland. Around the world there are some­thing like twelve million Roma. But the hatred is often the same. And the tarring brush paints both groups as secretive, immoral, dishonest, ﬁlthy, uncouth, nomadic, predatory–the list is endless. You repeat something long enough, it becomes the truth. Let me tell you this: In all my time with the Roma I was never hassled, never robbed, never pushed away. I suppose in the end I was the one who was robbing from them. I went there with all the prejudices intact and came away a changed person. That’s what I want the book to do too. It’s a lofty aim, but why not aim high, since most of our ﬂights of desire fall short, anyway? I believe in the social novel. People ask me why I didn’t write about the travelers. I don’t know. It wasn’t the right time for me. It wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. I had found this Polish poet, Papusza, and she took my breath away. It was her story that Zoli was modelled on. It probably would have been easier to tell the story of the travelers. At least I would have had some geography in place. As it was, I had a mad time just researching this book. I started from point blank nothing. And I had to build from there.

FM: Zoli is a survivor. And she survives primarily on her wits, but in the end she survives and endures by her use of language, her songs, her poetry. Is there a message behind this?

CM: As much as there’s a message behind anything, I sup­pose. Language is at the fulcrum of all that we do. Language and memory. Nobody knows that better than you. That was at the heart of Angela’s Ashes.

FM: Some of what amazes me is that there is still very little literature available about the Roma, but there are anywhere from ten to twelve million Gypsies living in the world. Why are there not more stories told?

CM: There’s a kaleidoscope of reasons I suppose. Firstly they have traditionally been an oral culture. Very little was written from within–until recent years, that is. Until Romani schol­ars began to say that one of the ways of combating clichŽ is not by silence, but by speech. And then there ’s the ability, or in­ability, of the non-Roma to listen. We need to learn how to lis­ten to the stories that are there, and to have a deep-rooted empathy within us. We need to destroy our own stereotypes and build from the ground up. Because we have so many stereotypes. And they can commit murder, these stereotypes. They can ﬂy fascist ﬂags, they can spit, they can sterilize, they can kill. And I come back again, as I often do, to John Berger’s line: “Never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one.” Stories must be told from all angles. Those who try to own them are those who abuse power. Do I believe that litera­ture has power? Certainly. I have to believe that. And every writer who has ever lived under a tyrannical government knows that a lot better than I do.

FM: Ireland is in the midst of a huge economic boom. Some of that means that the Roma are coming in from Bosnia, from Romania, from Slovakia, along with thousands of other immi­grants. Ireland is in the midst of a cultural boom, or bust, de­pending whom you talk to. You started writing about other cultures at a young age. Do you think you were, in a way, writ­ing the history of your country in advance?

CM: Well, I don’t know. I do think writers anticipate things, though they’re not necessarily conscious of it. Fiction suggests trends and then has to come around, afterwards, and re-interpret them. I will tell you this, though. I remember writing a story called “Fishing the Sloe-Black River.” It was a magic realist story about emigration, women ﬁshing for their sons. I thought at the time that it was cutting edge. And I never thought it would be anything but that. However here I am, almost twenty years later, and that story strikes me as decidedly quaint now. It seems so old-fashioned. It’s strange. Life is gloriously unﬁn­ished. We never know what it’s going to deal us.

FM: Great steps have been made in Ireland in recent years. Why not write about those? Why bother with what you call the “small, dark anonymous corners”?

CM: Because I suppose every story is a story about Ireland. To expand the consciousness of what it means to come from that little, dark, shadowed country and then to realise that it’s not dark and shadowed at all. As Whitman says, every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.

CM: Well, it’s become too expensive, that’s for sure! I can’t recognize it when I go home. I think the new emigration (as a problem) is the problem of return. It’s not so hard to leave any­more. It’s hard to go back. Brodsky talks about the notion of not being able to go back to the country that doesn’t exist any­more. Also, I think we ’re at a time when a lot of us are looking out. We will have to look quickly inward again and write the Irish novel from within. But there ’s nothing wrong with being out­side for a while. It gives us perspective. I think we ’re getting ready to jump back in, feet-ﬁrst. I know I want to. I want to go in and take it all on. Just when everyone starts thinking that I’m not an Irish novelist at all, I want to go back and ﬁnd the voice of my land. Because that is where my voice came from. And I have a deep love and appreciation, and maybe a healthy dose of skepticism, of and for Ireland.

FM: And the next project is . . . ?

CM: That said, it’s a New York novel that has 9-11 implications, though it’s set in 1974. And it’s about joy and technology and faith and all those crazy things. After that, the Irish book. Jesus, that’s looking into the future, isn’t it?

For further information, readers can go to colummccann.com

Discussion Questions

Discussion Guides

1. Many Romani scholars have argued that the portrayal of Gypsy communities in the mainstream media is partly respon­sible for ongoing negative stereotypes. McCann opens the novel from the point-of-view of a journalist who seems to be sympathetic toward Zoli, but as the novel progresses the jour­nalist’s attitude seems to be benign but superﬁcial. What does the journalist represent?

2. What do we, as readers, learn on a deeper, more substantial level about the life of the Roma from Zoli’s story?

3. Zoli’s story–even when raw and terribly sad–is told in smooth, bold, simple strokes, almost as if she is whispering in our ears. The Roma are known for having a predominantly oral culture. How much do you think that Zoli (and, by exten­sion, the author) value the art of intimate storytelling?

4. Zoli is asked by a little girl how she can be both “on” the radio and on the road at the same time. “But something lay be­hind it, Zoli knew, even then: both places at once, radio and road, impossible alongside the other” (p. 151). How can old tra­ditions survive in the modern world?

5. In the 1940s and ’50s, Zoli becomes a poster girl for social­ism. But then the socialists try to put her and her whole culture in the “Gypsy jam jar” (p. 119). As a result, her own people blame her for what happens. Soon, she is betrayed on all sides. Is Zoli a prophet of sorts? Are prophets inevitably doomed to banishment?

6. Stephen Swann falls in love with Zoli. At times he believes that the love is fully requited, but is he just deluding himself? Is he a reliable narrator?

7. “We had interrupted her solitude in order to compensate for our own,” says Swann (p. 128). Why does Swann feel so lonely and outcast before Zoli’s banishment? Is he a forerunner of a certain type of international wanderer? Is he at heart, ironi­cally, what some people might have called a “gypsy”?

8. Is Zoli a poet or a singer? Or are they the same thing?

9. When McCann ﬁrst embarked on this novel he says he knew “little or nothing” about the Romani culture. What was your own experience of the Gypsy way of life? Has it changed now after reading the novel?

10. Not the least of McCann’s achievements is the realism of the voices of his characters. How does he achieve the verisimilitude?

11. “One always loves what is left behind,” says Zoli (p. 258). Is our view of Romani life solely based on some sentimental folk memory of something that does not exist anymore? Will ignorance prevent the embrace of true cultural diversity? Or will memory and/or poetry carry it through?

12. This epic story encompasses the twentieth century’s battles with fascism and communism and idealism. Yet it comes back to the fundamental search for home. How much do the politics of our times deﬁne where our true homes are?

13. The epigraph quotes Tahar Djaout: “If you keep quiet, you die. If you speak, you die. So speak and die.” How much faith or strength do you think Zoli would put in these words?

14. Zoli says “I still call myself black even though I have rolled around in ﬂour” (p. 277). What do you understand her to mean by this?

15. Zoli triumphs in Paris. It is a small, personal triumph, a journey toward joy. Will that joy extend itself through the rest of her days? Do you think her poetry will now be rescued and sung by others? What happens to Zoli after the final page?